Henri Poincare Quotes

I very much enjoyed my career in science. I didn't leave science because I was disillusioned, but felt I'd done my bit for it after about twenty-five years.

As you know, in most areas of science, there are long periods of beginning before we really make progress.

Science fiction is the WikiLeaks of science, getting word to the public about what cutting-edge research really means.

There are cases when it takes 50 or 100 years for fundamental science to achieve results.

Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics.

It was getting the results that made science worth doing; the accolades were a thin, secondary pleasure.

The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error.

The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike.

Within the last fifty years, the extraordinary growth of every department of physical science has spread among us mental food of so nutritious and stimulating a character that a new ecdysis seems imminent.

To the scientists of the Renaissance, your critic was really your ally, helping you advance upon reality. Critics in science are not like drama critics, determining flops and successes. Criticism to scientists is just another means of finding out whether they're wrong, like running another experiment to see if it confirms or refutes a theory. Along with the advocacy principle of the courtroom, It is one of the best ways human beings have evolved to get closer to the truth.

If you watch a movie from between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1970s, whenever anyone steps out in a white lab coat, they're there to offer a solution. They're there to tell you how the laser's going to save the day. They're going to give you James Bond's array of tools. After about 1975, whenever the man in the white lab coat steps out, it's to come up with some crazy idea that's going to bring ruin on everybody. "Let's clone dinosaurs!" And the last we see of him is disappearing down the gullet of the Tyrannosaurus rex.

It is the great beauty of our science, chemistry, that advancement in it, whether in a degree great or small, instead of exhausting the subjects of research, opens the doors to further and more abundant knowledge, overflowing with beauty and utility.

I have faith that science is a good thing. Seriously, I'd say that I am very much in awe of nature. In fact, I think to some extent, "awe" was a word that was almost invented for scientists.

Has science ever retreated? No! It is Catholicism which has always retreated before her, and will always be forced to retreat.

The stumbling way in which even the ablest of the scientists in every generation have had to fight through thickets of erroneous observations, misleading generalizations, inadequate formulation, and unconscious prejudice is rarely appreciated by those who obtain their scientific knowledge from textbooks.

Science is progressing at such a rapid rate that when you make a prediction and think you are ahead of your time by 100 years you may be ahead of your time by 10 at most.

With the aid of these active experimental sciences man becomes an inventor of phenomena, a real foreman of creation; and under this head we cannot set limits to the power that he may gain over nature through future progress of the experimental sciences.

Without science, there would be no such hope.

The progression of physical science is much more connected with your prosperity than is usually imagined. You owe to experimental philosophy some of the most important and peculiar of your advantages. It is not by foreign conquests chiefly that you are become great, but by a conquest of nature in your own country.

The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by.

Nothing great in science has ever been done by men, whatever their powers, in whom the divine afflatus of the truth-seeker was wanting.

Moreover, the works already known are due to chance and experiment rather than to sciences; for the sciences we now possess are merely systems for the nice ordering and setting forth of things already invented; not methods of invention or directions for new works.

Scientific progress consists in the development of new concepts.

As we all know, blinking lights means science.